PLC programming
SFC - PLCopen publishes 'do's & don'ts'
Today, guidelines for structuring software exist for many programming languages. As far as the IEC 61131-3 languages and their PLCopen extensions are concerned, there have long been deficits here. PLCopen has now rectified these - including the topic of SFC.
In order to cope with the complexity of larger programs, modern software development processes are needed today that support a structured approach and generate reusable code. It is also important to increase efficiency by reusing predefined functionalities. With this in mind, PLCopen launched an initiative for software construction guidelines in 2015, which has so far resulted in the publication of two documents:
- PLCopen Coding Guidelines (published in 2016) and
- Creation of PLCopen-compliant libraries (published in 2017)
With 'Structuring with SFC: do's and don'ts', a third document has now been published as version 1.0. This document explains the advantages of Sequential Function Chart - SFC for short. SFC is a graphical formalism of IEC 61131-3 that offers the possibility of dividing a program organization unit of a programmable controller into a series of steps and transitions that are connected to each other by directed links. Each step is assigned a series of actions, and each transition is assigned a transition condition. Since SFC elements require the storage of status information, the only blocks that can be structured with these elements are function blocks and programs (not functions).
The document can be downloaded as a PDF from the PLCopen website.
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